Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Craving...

For those who are newer to the blog and thus haven't heard me write about it recently, I serve a smaller church surrounded by open fields, and live right next door. We've deduced that the owner of said fields planted soybeans this year, and spent the past two weeks harvesting them, so now the fields are left bare until summer. The other morning I woke up, glanced out the kitchen window, and experienced a rapid sensation of my hopes getting way up and then being let down all within a few seconds. I had thought by the way the daylight was hitting the ground, that the field had recieved a light dusting of snow. Such a sight would have brought peace to me, like a painting that you wish you could crawl into. But of course it was October and no such thing was really possible.We all crave those magical pictures or moments in time. We crave to hold onto them, to somehow capture them on film and just hit 'repeat' for a few hours. They soften the harder moments, they balance them out. The fall foliage does that for me, as does the sight of a snowy field. There are reasons that people just sit and stare at the ocean, at a sunset, at a mountain range. While that's going on, something else isn't.

Popular posts from this blog

What I believe, and have dedicated my life to reversing, is that we have not moved doctrine and dogma to the level of inner experience. As long as "received teaching" doesn't become experiential knowledge, we're going to continue creating a high quantity of disillusioned ex-believers. Or on the flip-side, we'll manufacture very rigid believers who simply hold on to doctrines in very dry, dead ways with nothing going on inside. - Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance

I've been in a few internet arguments in my day. As many as I've been a part of, I can recall no such argument that has resulted in either party changing their stated position or even coming out on the other side feeling like a better, more complete person. The only possibility for the latter, in my experience, is each person in the exchange feeling a sense of confirmation that they are right and the other side is incredibly delusional. Thankfully, I've had enough cyber-scrums to know when to pul…

So if life is a journey, then spirituality is an essential part of the passage. Mysticism is not some sort of static experience, a moment in time in which a person feels especially united with God. Rather, it is a process, an unfolding dimension of movement and change that takes place over the course of many seasons. - Carl McColman, Answering the Contemplative Call

Whenever I tell people that I'm in a program to be certified as a spiritual director, there comes the inevitable attempt for me to explain what exactly that means. I confess that I still haven't found the best way to do this: I muddle through something about coaching people in their prayer life, leading them through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and walking with them on their spiritual journey.

One of the main reasons I wanted to pursue this program was due to a perception that many Christians, particularly in American Protestantism, don't seem to be incredibly aware of the deep, rich tradition…